A small part of history

Today John Butcher reminded me of the story I told him about bringing the first Apple to the CCCP. He said, You were truly part of history, Mau!

Actually it was a Mac II—not even a SE, no hard drive. Floppy floppies. After I picked it up from Apple, I had to go to the airport and get an affidavit signed from the military in order to take it to the USSR. It was the first Mac ever in the Ukraine—as far as I know. I heard rumor of one in L'Vov, but it wasn't confirmed. So I had to keep track of it as it was still considered somewhat "classified," if, not somewhat obsolete. Soviet city officials kept trying to abscond with it—so I went on record—TASS and radio, as well as local news venues to announce that the Mac was a Sister City gift from Santa Rosa to Cherkassy. That finally worked. What was a scream, was that no one could read/understand the English—and I had to learn PC-speak to explain how it worked. We tried changing the resident ROM Chicago font for a Cyrillic font—which didn't work. Every time we rebooted it reverted to Chicago. That led to a trip to Apple R&D—which eventually kicked off the development of the multi-orthographic Mac interfaces we know today. Yes, I guess we were a small part of that history.